Facebook Frolics, Running Naked through the News Dept. 2
Edward Wasserman finds the trend for persons to get news via Facebook rather disturbing. A snippet:
That seems to be what now has happened. By throwing in with Facebook, news sites rent space in a virtual metropolis teeming with enthusiasts, who send traffic their way, and permeated by commercial vendors.
That’s the good part of the story. The rest of the story is that their readers’ online comings and goings, likes and dislikes, are noted, rummaged, inventoried, and harvested for data to be acted on and resold by Facebook and its collaborators.
Read the rest, then go buy a newspaper.
November 12, 2014 at 12:09 pm
It’s a crap substitute for a real newspaper, or going directly to the newspaper site. In practice, your ‘friends’ fill up your timeline with clickbait and news stories of atrocity and outrage from the same couple of sources, depending on their political lean. It’s why I call them the pearl clutchers. They pass around the same limited collection, every day.
November 12, 2014 at 1:47 pm
It’s probably been months since I logged into Facebook except to maintain a page for a volunteer association of which I’m a member, and, thankfully, they’ve found someone else to do the FB aspect of their self-promotion.
I don’t begrudge their have an FB page. If you are trying to reach out to people, you must go to where the people are.